Personal Relevance in Story Reading

Abstract

Although personal relevance is key to sustaining an audience’s interest in any given narrative, it has received little systematic attention in scholarship to date. Across centuries and media, adaptations have been used extensively to bring temporally or geographically distant narratives “closer” to the recipient under the assumption that their impact will increase. In this article, we review experimental and other empirical evidence on narrative processing in order to unravel which types of personal relevance are more likely to be impactful than others, which types of impact (e.g., aesthetic, therapeutic, persuasive) they have been found to generate, and where their power becomes excessive or outright detrimental to reader experience. Together, the evidence suggests that narratives are read through the lens of the reader’s self-schema independently of genre, although certain groups of readers, especially in certain situations, may experience personal relevance and related effects more strongly than others. The literature further suggests that large-scale similarities between reader and character (e.g., gender) may not per se be enough for relevance effects to arise and that emotional valence has a role to play in the process alongside thematic saliency.

Wattpad as a resource for literary studies. Quantitative and qualitative examples of the importance of digital social reading and readers’ comments in the margins

“…Some of the comments we presented in this article show that readers' responses are often contradictory, even for short paragraphs, and there is not just one kind of reader [10,125]. Ultimately, the comments are a resource for different kinds of inquiries, investigating how during reading: values are negotiated; identities are constructed; authors interact with readers; metaphors are interpreted; intertextual connections are built; factors like "experiential background" [126] and "personal relevance" [127] affect reader response; etc. It has been debated whether marginalia can actually help to understand reading practices of the past [7,[128][129][130][131][132].…”

Real readers reading Wasco’s ‘City’: A storyworld possible selves approach

“…These studies, further discussed by Martinez (2018: 1–40), unanimously highlight the role of emotion, both derived from empathic attachment to characters (Keen, 2011), where empathy is understood as ‘feeling the same as the other’ (Miall and Kuiken, 2002: 223), and from fresh emotions , or emotions not shared with any of the characters (Miall and Kuiken, 2002). Furthermore, these emotional responses are found to be strongly idiosyncratic (Holland, 2009; Miall and Kuiken, 2002), as they are derived from feelings of personal relevance (Kuzmičová and Bálint, 2019) and of resonance , or memory recall (Seilman and Larsen, 1989). Narrative engagement has also been understood as the enlivenment and enactment of a character’s or narrator’s embodied perspective on the storyworld (Caracciolo, 2017; Kuiken et al, 2004), and as a process of embodied simulation of a character’s experiences (Lamm et al, 2007; Oatley, 2016).…”

“…This frequently involves identification with characters, particularly first-person narrators and character-focalizers (Kuiken et al, 2004; Oatley, 2016). Most importantly, since early times, narrative scholars have underscored the presence of feelings of self-transformation (Kuzmičová and Bálint, 2019; Miall and Kuiken, 2002), which can be traced back to Aristotle’s notion of catharsis , a kind of clearing or cleansing of the soul (Burke, 2011: 12). However, the methodological issue still lingers.…”

m-Reading: Fiction reading from mobile phones

“…While touring Rome, for instance, m-readers can deliberately access collections of the Latin classics, or a contemporary crime novel set in the same city, to read during breaks. Alternatively, they may use their device to search for Roman sites of particular interest on Wikipedia and come across links to online literary content to immerse in, its local relevance potentially enhancing their immersion (Kuzmičová and Bálint, 2019). Thus, m-reading introduces into fiction experiences previously unknown levels of what media and communication scholarship terms incidental, as opposed to intended (Tewksbury et al, 2001), exposure.…”

“…Unlike immediate immersion as measured by the Transportation Scale, long-term immersion operates in the background of readers’ other activities. It is long-term immersion that makes us continue to ‘live with’ a piece of fiction beyond instances of reading proper (see also Kuzmičová and Bálint, 2019; Mar et al, 2011).…”